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Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

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Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#51

Post by colechristensen »

cute_boi wrote: post #29
thmsths wrote: post #9

The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion. A not yet explained phenomenon or even something as far fetched as "aliens" would have been a more comforting answer than "essentially we can all start losing our mind at once, and it takes very little to trigger it".

[flagged]

Every ten years or so there's a new batch of evidence that eating a lot of something has some health effects for some folks. Then a minority turns it into a morality cult against the thing and the media picks it up as "you woudn't guess what common food could be killing you"

And then ten years later new evidence for that thing comes out that's like "maybe not so bad after all!" and a new set of backlash morality. These things are politically affiliated now too if they can be depending on who picks up which evidence first.

Each decade people get bored and find something new to be upset about.

"gluten" is definitely way down these days and "seed oils" haven't yet hit their peak.

Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#52

Post by mvkel »

The difference these days seems to be that the frequency of the hysterical events has gone up. One every other month, rather than every other year.

What happens to a society that has been desensitized to mass-hysteria, where no single event can evoke a reaction? Is it a horseshoe, where we're so vigilant that nothing fazes us anymore? Do we lose our humanity in the process?

Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#53

Post by willy_k »

engcoach wrote: post #47
willy_k wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are without a doubt large drones with nav lights flying around multiple states at night now. There are a lot of people seeing drones where they aren’t, too, and it would be odd if that weren’t happening. But to take that and say “nothing to see here” is ignoring the mass of solid video and official non-statement evidence to the contrary. I myself saw a drone, and tried to paint it as a plane or helicopter at fi…

You can't gauge the airspeed of an airplane from the ground. What you are observing is the ground speed , which is affected by winds. So a small Cessna flying into a heavy headwind can appear to move very, very slowly relative to the ground.

I’m aware of that, and I tried to think that was what was happening. But the motion apart from speed was nothing like a typical plane, and the other factors led me to conclude it was a drone. When I say the FAA light patterns were off, what I mean is that it had two red lights on the outside, and two green lights on the inside. AFAIK, the only type of aircraft that might have that configuration is a trans-wing drone.

Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#54

Post by psc »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #22
thmsths wrote: post #9

The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion. A not yet explained phenomenon or even something as far fetched as "aliens" would have been a more comforting answer than "essentially we can all start losing our mind at once, and it takes very little to trigger it".

I dunno, "collective delusion" sounds worse than a simpler "we weren't paying attention to the Thing, then media/memes sprung up and made us pay attention and we freaked out". This happens all the time in our current media landscape. "Yeah health insurance denies claims sometimes, that's normal" to "wait actually health insurance denies claims routinely to increase its profits!?" There are tons of things that we deci…

> There are tons of things that we decide to ignore to go on with our lives

Absolutely, we all need to filter the overwhelming amount of information we're faced with. The part that seems terrifying is that occasionally our filters can line up in such a way as to pick up what's just pure noise and escalate it into an enormous positive feedback loop.

And of course there's a whole discussion about how those filters are shaped (by the media we consume, authorities we decide to trust, direct experience) and how that's changed over time.

Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#55

Post by vehemenz »

kryogen1c wrote: post #30
thmsths wrote: post #9

The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion. A not yet explained phenomenon or even something as far fetched as "aliens" would have been a more comforting answer than "essentially we can all start losing our mind at once, and it takes very little to trigger it".

I think that people, on the whole, vastly underestimate the degree to which humans are animals.

Maybe I'm more optimistic. Is it our animal nature? Or is it that science is hard, and most people don't have enough formal education in the relevant subjects to know they're out of their depth, let alone to understand these things.

Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#56

Post by jerf »

chiffre01 wrote: post #8

The TLDR cause was: The windshield pitting epidemic was a case of collective delusion, where heightened awareness, media influence, and misattributed environmental factors led people to notice and misinterpret existing, ordinary damage as a mysterious phenomenon.

It might be better to say that it was a case of a collective shattered delusion, where the delusion was "my windshield normally is not pitted". In modern parlance, it was a collective "can't unsee" moment.

A delusion would imply that people were claiming their windshields were pitted and they weren't... but I'm sure they were.

Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#57

Post by carabiner »

The subreddit /r/njdrones is sooo off the rails right now. It started out as "I think this is a drone, maybe military?" to classifying different drones as energy "orbs" and "mimics" that only look like airplanes when photographed.

Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#58

Post by krunck »

thmsths wrote: post #9

The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion. A not yet explained phenomenon or even something as far fetched as "aliens" would have been a more comforting answer than "essentially we can all start losing our mind at once, and it takes very little to trigger it".

Witch!!!

Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#59

Post by gopher_space »

oldgradstudent wrote: post #17
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens all the time. See: drone sightings right now. Previously: Havana syndrome.

Havana syndrome can have a far less charitable explanation. There is no objective test for Havana syndrome, but being diagnosed with it grants significant financial and non-financial benefits.

The veterinary world has a specific term for a condition they can’t diagnose, and I appreciate the intellectual honesty behind that.

Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#60

Post by lm28469 »

willy_k wrote: post #37
AlexandrB wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why someone would see lights in the sky and jump to anything other than "domestic/commercial aircraft". Why would aliens or foreign powers light their vehicles up for easy spotting? I would really start to worry if I spotted an aircraft at dusk/night with no lights on it.

There are without a doubt large drones with nav lights flying around multiple states at night now. There are a lot of people seeing drones where they aren’t, too, and it would be odd if that weren’t happening. But to take that and say “nothing to see here” is ignoring the mass of solid video and official non-statement evidence to the contrary. I myself saw a drone, and tried to paint it as a plane or helicopter at fi…

> ignoring the mass of solid video

100% of the ones I looked into have been debunked, helicopters, planes, out of focus stars, fireworks, &c.

> (seemed a few hundred feet up at most)

At night you have absolutely no way to tell

> And most damningly it didn’t make any noise audible from the ground, something not even stealth bombers can accomplish.

My $300 dji can accomplish that, it's not a chinese super weapon nor an alien craft

> Honestly, it kind of freaked me out having some previously abstract news-cycle object just floating ominously down the road across from me.

That's the definition of media induced mass hysteria, you notice a lot of weird things when you look at things you usually don't bother looking at. People in Los Angeles freaked the fuck out when they saw the milky way during an electricity outage in 1994

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